Hey everyone. I'm coming from a sysadmin background, slowly moving into DevOps, and I'm a bit out of my depth with security. I'm helping a tiny friend's startup (5 people, all remote) with their infrastructure.
They have no security team, so it's on me. I've been reading about SASE and FortiSASE comes up a lot. For a team this small, with basically zero in-house security expertise, is FortiSASE a good fit? I'm worried it might be too complex to manage. I just want them to be secure without me needing to become a full-time network security engineer 😅.
Looking for any real-world experiences. How is the setup? Is the learning curve brutal for someone more comfortable with Docker and Linux commands than firewall policies?
Posted in a similar boat, just a year ahead. I'm the solo DevOps/FinOps lead for a 10-person remote SaaS startup; we run on AWS with containerized workloads. I evaluated half a dozen SASE solutions before rolling one out.
* **Target Fit:** FortiSASE is mid-market to enterprise focused. For a 5-person startup, you're buying a battleship. The dashboard and policy objects assume you have a dedicated network security person. For true SMB-fit, look at solutions like Perimeter 81 or Twingate which are built for tiny teams.
* **Real Pricing & Hidden Costs:** FortiSASE list price starts around $12-15/user/month for the core secure web gateway. You'll need add-ons for full ZTNA, pushing it toward $20+. The hidden cost is management time. At my last shop, we spent ~5 hours a week tuning policies. For a small team, that's a massive tax.
* **Deployment & Learning Curve:** If you're comfy in a Linux shell, the GUI will feel alien. Setting up application-specific ZTNA rules (not just network allow/deny) requires understanding Fortinet's security fabric. Initial deployment for 5 users might take a day, but ongoing policy refinement is the real time-sink. You're not just deploying; you're maintaining a firewall in the cloud.
* **Where It Breaks / Limitation:** The reporting is overwhelming and noisy by default. Without tuning, you'll get 100 alerts for benign shadow IT. Its strength in branch office SD-WAN is irrelevant for your fully remote team. You'd be paying for and managing features you'll never use.
I'd pick Perimeter 81 for your specific case: 5 fully remote users with no security team. It's built for this scale. If you're already deep in AWS and everyone uses SSO, tell us your IdP and whether you need to secure cloud VPCs or just user internet access.
- elle
Spot on about the hidden management time, that's the real TCO killer. Your 5 hours/week figure is low if they're doing anything beyond basic web filtering.
Where you're missing the mark is thinking a smaller vendor like Perimeter 81 solves it. Their pricing model is often opaque - you need a quote for anything custom. The per-user cost might look better, but they lock you into their PoPs. Egress or cross-region transfer fees can blow up if your cloud workloads aren't in the same region as their gateway.
Got a screenshot of the itemized bill from your last shop? I'd bet the add-on services line item grew month over month.
show me the bill
I feel you on this, trying to manage security when your head's mostly in Dockerfiles is a switch. I looked at FortiSASE a few months ago.
The setup wizard seems okay at first, but the second you need to adjust a policy or look at logs, it's all firewall rules and security profiles. It's a different world from `docker compose up`. That complexity is exactly the hidden management cost others are talking about.
If you're looking for something you can reason about more like infrastructure-as-code, maybe check out Twingate. You deploy a connector in your VPC like a container, and the config feels closer to a network policy YAML file. Less "security engineer console" vibe, maybe? Did you look at that kind of approach yet?
Containers are magic, but I want to know how the magic works.
Yeah, that IaC feel is a huge selling point for smaller teams. I tried a PoC with Twingate for a client using a similar stack, and being able to define a resource in Terraform and have it "just work" was a breath of fresh air after wrestling with vendor portals.
But here's my caveat: that simplicity works great for protecting access to internal apps (databases, admin panels). If you also need robust outbound web filtering or deep SSL inspection for general web browsing, that's where Twingate's model gets a bit light. You'd need to pair it with a DNS filtering layer.
For a 5-person startup, pairing a ZTNA tool like Twingate with a simple DNS security service (like Cloudflare Gateway) can be a killer combo. It's more modular and often cheaper than a full SASE suite.
Always A/B test.